Thursday, January 15, 2015

The Amazing Self-Drawing Map

Sketch Map is a clever interactive map which uses D3.js and Walkway.js to sketch a road map one little bit at a time. Zoom in and out on the map or pan around and you can observe how the roads and transit lines are sketched out in real-time.

When I first saw the map in action my initial thoughts were '... this is very clever. Not very useful ... but very clever'. However, thinking about this a little more, I can see some possible uses for this. You could possibly use the animated drawing function to animate the drawing of a route on top of a map.

You could also use this technique to add different layers to a map. For example, you could give users the option to add building footprints to a basic road map. When this option is selected you could then sketch the footprints onto the map using the sketchcart technique.

If you want to have a play around with this yourself the code for Sketchcart is available under an MIT license on Github.